Germany's new far-right populists rail against Islam

They march in their thousands every Monday evening, wave German national flags and angrily protest against “criminal asylum seekers” and the “Islamisation” of their home country. In recent months, Germany has witnessed the emergence of a far-right populist movement that has drawn support from hardcore neo-Nazis and also a small but growing anti-euro party, the AfD. Germany was rattled this week when the latest in a series of marches in the eastern city of Dresden by the “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident”, or PEGIDA, drew over 10,000 people. The group’s name is in itself “a veritable call to arms by far-right populists”, evoking echoes of Christian crusaders and Nazi propaganda, said Hajo Funke of Berlin’s Free University.